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The War On Frats

In my youth, fraternities were seen as a ridiculous anachronism by my coevals. We knew one guy in a fraternity and he was a raging douche bag. Part of this is private school culture, where the Greek system has less of an impact on college life. Big state colleges have been the most fruitful campuses for fraternities. Then there is the fact that Jesuit schools tend not to have Greek life at all. This is what’s called a statement of interest. I’m indifferent to frats and maybe a bit hostile to them.

The war on frats we see on the college campus provides a window into the internal evolution of Progressivism. It’s where back benchers in the Cult apply the lessons they learned from the most recent sermons. For instance, the unhinged story peddled by the mentally disturbed coed about being gang raped at a Virginia frat is obviously learned behavior. The girl was marinating in anti-male, anti-white hysteria on campus so her natural girl-drama manifested as a feminist bodice ripper. She responded to her training.

The war on college fraternities is an example how feminized the Left is today. Every day there is a story about how white bros are in trouble for being white bros doing what bros tend to do. It is a deliberate campaign to criminalize normal, middle-class white guy behavior. Fraternities are the consummate bourgeois activity. The fraternity is a semi-adult version of the tree house, where boys can learn how to be males with a degree of adult supervision. This behavior is no longer tolerated because males are no longer wanted.

Almost always, the behavior that gets the frat in trouble offends the delicate sensibilities of the homely girls on campus. A few years ago, Penn State had a meltdown over the KDR fraternity making ugly girls sad. Basically some bros talked some hot girls into posing topless. Now the school is trying throw a frat in jail for a hazing related death. Given the age of fake news, the truth will be nothing like the reports. That’s not to excuse criminal behavior, but the reaction is extreme even if the reports are accurate.

The war on fraternities is also a good study of how the Left operates to undermine traditional institutions. It used to be that frats were self-funded, independent organizations. In many cases, they operated off campus to avoid trouble with college authorities. Those Penn State frats, for example, are off-campus in privately owned houses. This arms-length relationship started to end when colleges “offered” to help the frats collect dues and enforce their rules. Fraternity payments became a part of the tuition bill.

What was pitched as a goodwill gesture to help fraternities, quickly turned into a beachhead for Progressive nutters to impose their rules. The Prog mind always seeks to first gain entry into the organization. From there, they begin to agitate for changes that open the door for their coreligionists. In the case of fraternities, they imposed rules on how the frats select members and maintain discipline. Colleges are now beginning the process of forcing fraternities to admit women, thus eliminating their reason to exist.

There are two lessons to be drawn from the jihad against white men on campus. One is that there can never be any negotiating with the Progs. A negotiation means both sides seek a resolution, but Progs seek only one end and that is your death, even if it means their death. Whatever American Progressivism was in the past, it is now a nihilistic death cult. The Progs sitting down with the campus frats to work out rules, do so with a singular goal and that is the elimination of white males from the college campus.

The other thing is Progs enjoy their own hypocrisy. They relish it, so pointing it out to them has the opposite effect from what is intended. The defenders of Greek life point out that male sportsballers tend to go rapey on campus, yet no one is trying to shut down the football team. Progs find this energizing. It means they are in control and therefore can arbitrarily enforce the rules. Appeals to administrative consistency are blood in the water for the Progs. It makes them more vicious.

Within the next decade, the Greek system will be dismantled. Sororities will exist, mostly for the homely girls and the lesbians. Fraternities will be “normalized” which means they will be re-engineered to Prog standards, mostly out of spite. They will be for homosexuals and feminist fag-hags. The names will be maintained to piss off the old white guys who remember their days in the frat. In time, the whole thing will collapse as the Progs run out of reasons to celebrate their victory.

That’s ultimately the lesson here. Progressives like to use utopian language about multiculturalism and egalitarianism, but their movement is just a death cult now. It is the ideology of the arsonist. To be a Prog today is a laundry list of complaints about the various hobgoblins in Progressive mythology. There’s no affirmative identity, just a negative one. Once the bogeyman is slain, though, they have to reason to exist, which is why a Prog from fifty years ago would not recognize the modern Prog.

Another astute observation from the Zman. Thank you. 20 years after the First World War the German National Socialists tried to reverse history’s verdict. It was revenge, pure and simple. And total – it was do or die. After the collapse of communism the same situation presented itself. This time, for the college progs, the rest of the west may have won the cold war, but here on campus it’s still the soviet victory for all time. And, as Zman understands too well, it’s do or die. And they don’t care if it destroys them in the process. Without the… Read more »

Two of the links clearly demonstrated how the individual members of an organization resulted in someone dying. This third link is also lucid in its detail of conduct that is anti-Western Civilization in nature as admitted by these “brothers”. The Greek system will not be dismantled. This traditional institution will remain an influential force on college campuses. Hate facts, to be certain.

Your entire post is an essay in disqualifying, disqualifying, disqualifying.

Resorting to ad hominem attacks is most girlish and churlish on your part. While the Greek system will not be removed on college campuses, If anything, the changing nature of fraternities is an expression of cultural decadence. I mean, is not their inclusion of vibrants among their ranks, their emphasis on procuring sex outside of marriage, their reverence to secularism undermining the very foundations of Western Civilization? Perhaps the source of your disdain should be focusing on the betas and cucks that run such organizations. You ought to be finding ways on how to convert these future foot soldiers to… Read more »

That’s the most frustrating thing about the Left — the stuff they make you defend that you’d much rather not. Frats at my public, bottom-tier State U. had a well-deserved reputation for douchebaggery which, judging by the vast numbers of ex-bros I ran into out in the business world, they never really lost. Up until about 2015, then, I’d have no problem if frats ceased to exist. But now the Left is attacking yet another vestige of our right to free association, so…. *sigh*…. go Beta Zeta Theta, brah.

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” H. L. Mencken

Sorry for the dumb question, but what exactly is the purpose of a college fraternity? How does it contribute to benefitting a students academic achievements? Do students who become members end up better educated?

Keep in mind, what most Europeans know of them, fraternities are often portrayed (in movies at least) as nothing more than a bunch of pre-pubescent deviants who get drunk or stoned and spend most of their time abusing themselves and/or other students.

I can only imagine they actually served a useful purpose at one time in American academia. Is that still true today?

Karl, they’re relics of Gilded Age fraternalism. Just as almost all American men joined an “order” back in the later 19th century — the Improved Order of Red Men, the Modern Woodmen, Oddfellows, etc. — so their sons joined junior versions (Sons of Confederate Veterans, etc.). The point was to practice being a middle-class man in controlled conditions, while making future business connections. There’s no point to them now, but since the university system itself is a relic of 19th century Prussia, we’ve kept them on.

Amazing to consider what “joiners” Americans were, until very recently. People in the 1970s watching “Happy Days” got all the jokes about the Leopard Lodge from the 1950s. There’s no similar tradition in Europe, for obvious reasons.

Z Man it’d have to be *very* informal though — otherwise, the club would get sued into oblivion the minute it published its charter, and the membership would receive their IRS audit notices about a week later. Though, The Leopard Lodge Online sounds way too early 90s…. that said, I’d join if there were such a thing. How about the Ancient and Online Order of Unreconstructed Badthinkers? I nominate you for Grand Poobah.

Off the top of my head, I think one way forward is for hate thinkers in an area to organize and join something like the local Mason lodge. Around here, they are begging for members so they would probably not ask too many questions. Once in, the haters take over and use it to recruit more hate thinkers. A degree of subterfuge would probably be necessary. Whether that’s possible is hard to know.

You have a pretty solid community here. Do you have any interest / means of getting people together, kinda like Ace of Spades’ “moron meetups”? At the very real risk of folks sperging out with the cloak-and-dagger routine….

The Freemasons at least here in my chunk of Southern California have more extreme vetting than a security clearance and to no good purpose since its largely a money grubbing organization best I can tell . That said organizing private clubs isn’t so much a fear of social consequences but a society in which even organizing a family is nigh impossible Many Americans are so terrified of collectivism and collective anything they can’t function that way outside of the military or police Its somewhat a product of diversity but also of relentless anti “collective” propaganda, ironically Leftism and of a… Read more »

The ritual in a Masonic Lodge is very similar today as when George Washington was an active Mason. There is no money grubbing but there are annual dues of an insignificant amount. No alcohol is allowed in a Masonic Lodge. Masonry became so popular that it lost its allure to the elite and the ritual of a meeting seems bizarre to the modern mind. Young people have no interest in Masonry so it is dying out as a mass organization. It will continue in existence on a smaller scale and will return to the form it once had. Masonry has… Read more »

Severian and Z Man, don’t be so sure that something analogous might not be happening even as we type something similar could be coalescing; over among the hard core of the Takitariat, and there was (and maybe still is) a growth over at the Anti-Idiotarian Riottweiler. Perhaps a Lodge of Unreconstructed Raccoons?
Heck, I think I can sense potential amongst the community right here at the Z Blog.

Karl,
Speaking as a guy who got a degree in CS, the most useful lessons I learned in College were taught by my fraternity. I learned more about dealing with people and getting along with people I would not have chosen to interact with from my frat that I did from going to school. I was much better prepared for the business world because of the experience.

Karl; Prior to the death of paternalistic university administration via Feminism’s complete ascendancy, some of the *value* fraternities used to provide included: – Essentially being a ‘safe space’ for young men suddenly cast alone into a strange, possibly dangerous and vast world compared to their home town/neighborhood and high school. There things like social identity and status were pretty well sorted out and now it was all up for grabs. For some this was an opportunity for a socio-economic do-over, for others it was a disorienting discovery that you were suddenly a minnow in a really big lake instead of… Read more »

@ Al FDN & George – Given the size of America, where young men and women would have come from all corners of the states in a time what was mostly rural, that does make sense. Today however, does it still?

Are young men and women who live in the dormitory, or off campus housing, less socially adjusted than those who live in frats?

Karl; A vexed question*: Every young person going anywhere for the first time to study or start work^ really must join a circle of friends for their sanity’s sake. This obviously involves sorting, both in and out. What’s the better method (since none are perfect)_? In the typical Big U experience you must start in a Freshman dorm before you can move off campus, etc. These can be as large as ~1,000 brand new inhabitants on a campus with a 40,000 + population. So even in your freshman dorm, you are just as lost in a sea of unfamiliar humanity… Read more »

Al is right. I went to Big U and joined a fraternity freshman year for the reasons he mentioned. Being religious, I found the fraternity to be no escape from the alienation of the modern Marxist campus. The ‘fraternity’ is a false brotherhood. Pledging is a form of artificially-induced shared hardship for the purpose of bonding, but in the end you’re just left with the reaction, “OK, so these are my ‘brothers’ now?” I’m not typically a joiner and am something of a contrarian, so maybe this was just a bad environment for me. Still, I saw no one flourishing… Read more »

My information is very dated, but some of the posts below confirm what I had heard and seen. Namely, that in the “engineering frats” (houses mostly populated by men in the STEM fields) there was very little in the way of hijinks and the guys mostly banded together to help each other out.

Fraternities began in Europe, Germany and Italy, during the Middle Ages. They served to provide living arrangements, companionship, and mutual aid for the university students. In recent America they continued to fulfill such purposes. Yes, they sometimes engage in drunken partying and rowdiness, but that is routine for non-frat males as well. in fact, with a frat house in which to carouse, instead of a distant dive, and with generally more mature older members to care for the younger ones, until they sober and then grow up.The latter part of my freshman year was my “drunk year” and by my… Read more »

My son just graduated from Penn State, and he was in a fraternity. Being a member gave him the ability to have an immediate group of friends, and, on campus, a way to attend parties and meet women. The frats had the best parties, and you can’t go to the bars until you are in your senior year (21). By the time he graduated, he had a core group of male friends (nice guys) and had aged out of the frat scene.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Liberals are desperate parasites fighting for their very lives because they know that they cannot survive in a world without government power to redirect resources to them. Politicians are craven grifters who prosper by fleecing the naive, then kicking the can down the road and hightailing it out of Dodge before the bill comes due. And most everyone else is suffering from the delusion that we can talk our way out of this mess. The faster we get to the bottom, the higher the bottom will be. And nothing will really change… Read more »

it’s my opinion that the post-war system is in fact collapsing “organically” and a lot of the misbehavior is coming out like bugs under a (lifted) rock. like an old dog, it’s time is up and it just can’t go on any longer. Looks very much like Trump is cutting europe loose, and keeping the UK close. Maybe the anglosphere will come to pass.

Once the bogeyman is slain, there will be a new bogeyman, always. When the Progs have eliminated the rest of us, they will immediately turn on each other, guaranteed. I was reading Ian Fleming’s “Dr. No” this weekend. Bond pointed out that if you wound a couple of the bloodthirsty attack dogs chasing him, they will turn on each other because they just want blood, and they don’t care where it comes from. I saw an interesting take on the Montana election attack on the newspaper reporter. The reporter had insisted on entering a private area blocked to him, in… Read more »

Your observation that progs enjoy their hypocrisy hits it foursquare. NR specializes in exposing the hypocrisy of legacy media and leftists. Goldberg had a rant several years ago along these lines, shouting “to hell with you people.” My question at the time was, yeah, but what are you going to do about it? I’ve since realized you don’t get that angry if you never expected different, and didn’t want approval. T

re: Fraternities My personal experience for four years could fill a whole book. Everything was positive. Gave me a home for four years with contact with a “family” away from home. It was intellectually uplifting and socially expanding. I was a STEM student so “networking” was not part of the experience. Only one individual has remained in my life from those four years in the 1960s to the present. My own son joined one while he was in college and also has only fond memories of his time in one during the 1990s. During my adult life I was a… Read more »

Progressivism isn’t so much a death cult as it is a low-profile, creeping totalitarianism. The obsessions of the progressives – race, sex, ‘gender’, ‘whiteness’, &c. – are nothing more than strategies, to be discarded when no longer useful for advancing their agenda.

I’d been away from home at Uni for a year before I joined a frat. Lonliest time of my life; I don’t get to know people easily. I knew nobody at the beginning of that year, and at the end of it I only knew my never-there dorm roommate. For me, my fraternity was a Godsend! Finally I got to know a bunch of guys, many almost clones of myself who were, like me, socially inept though intelligent enough; some other frat brothers were like older family members who liked to teach us How to Deal With Life. I learned… Read more »

Women are generally disposed to be offended by their perceptions of men’s crimes. High among such crimes are the failure to hold said women in sufficient awe and doing crazy shit with other guys. A lot of social friction can be avoided by living some or all of one’s university years in a fraternity. It worked for me. I got my engineering degree and, along with it, a good understanding of how to get along with others. Hollywood depictions of fraternities don’t show people studying differential equations, thermodynamics, and the like till 2:00 am all week and only on Friday… Read more »

“Sorry for the dumb question, but what exactly is the purpose of a college fraternity? How does it contribute to benefitting a students academic achievements? Do students who become members end up better educated?” While fraternity members will provide a litany of wonderful reasons their fraternity years were the best of their lives and how much they learned, how the friendships they made yada yada yada, the “real” reason men join a fraternity is their realization they can’t make it on their own. The idea of being able to get a job from someone they don’t even know just because… Read more »

The Prog War against fraternities has been going on for a long time. Frats were never popular with college and university administrations. When he was President of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson tried to ban “eating clubs,” the Princeton equivalent of frats. He failed to eliminate them completely because of strong alumni opposition but they have always been under Prog pressure since.

We all know a substantial portion of our people, of all people, are out and out assholes. They tend to be Progs, though some take the more reasonable course of becoming serial killers, burglars, bankers or lawyers. Back when we were all tribal the tribal leaders, elders and strongmen knew who they were and did pretty good job of controlling them, using their strengths and suppressing their weaknesses or, if necessary, getting rid of them. Why do you think American blacks are, generally speaking, such assholes? Their tribal elders sold their ancestors into slavery, or maybe even paid the Arabs… Read more »

“Progressivism is now a nihilistic death cult that seeks death, even its own” (paraphrase)

I don’t disagree, but could you explain that a bit more? Are progressives even aware of this? I recognize the kind of progressive you describe. They are very helpful. And they leverage their helpfulness in order to impose their ideology, and to control the organization of which they are a part. Death in what sense? How are they not aware of their own nihilism?

The Spanish “tertulia” makes for a good men’s club substitute. In my small village, the local priest (new here) put one together and it’s going well. Basically, it’s men only (core group of ten (all over 50), five irregulars, usually younger guys (over 35). We meet at the parish house on Sunday night, have a meal, wine, conversation and music. The priest’s intention is to get the participants (our local “gentry”) interested in beefing up parish life for the benefit of youth; it’s working! The emphasis is on tradition: the meals are prepared on site, typical Argentine outdoor-type things: the… Read more »

I’m an alum of Sigma Nu fraternity. My house had issues, but was mostly a good place, but some bad incidents did happen. Fraternities started out in the mid 1800s as a bonding of men with inspirational ideals to help build them into a better person, I still remember my fraternity creed: To believe in the life of love, to walk in the way of honor, to serve in the light of truth, this is the life the way and the light of Sigms Nu, this is the creed of our fraternity. However, much like the Catholich church, of which… Read more »

I can clearly see the war on fraternities, especially since my son just finished 5 years at Penn State, where I also went (and enjoyed the frat parties). His fraternity and others were subjected to more and more regulation every year he was there, and punished quite a bit too. The horrifying tragedy of the student who died at Beta Theta Pi has resulted in all fraternities being forbidden to recruit next fall. The tragedy is the young man’s death, but the response of banning all fraternities is obviously taking advantage of the tragedy to do something they want to… Read more »